Month: July 2018

In an earlier post, I discussed how to quickly make a one channel WiFi relay with a relay module an ESP8266-01 and some Dupont cables.
In a later post, I showed how to make a 4 channel WiFi relay with an ESP8266-01 and a 4 channel relay board.

Both posts were a consequence of 2 videos by Ralph Bacon, discussing his slightly disappointing adventures with 2 commercially available Wifi relay boards, based on an ESP8266-01.
Out of interest I bought one of those boards -knowing the shortcomings Ralph pointed out- that I presumed I could fix.

The board comes with an ESP8266-01s. It has a Reset button, which isn’t really useful. The GPIO0 drives the relay through a 7002 FET, GPIO2 drives an LED and TX and Rx are not connected to anything.

The crux of this board is that it is really designed for the ESP8266-01S, although it can be made to work with the regular ESP8266-01. The ESP8266-01S is a version that already has pull-ups on GPIO0 and GPIO2, albeit that one of those pullups is through an onboard LED. The regular ESP8266-01 does not have these pull ups and the relay board does not provide them.

The relay module uses only one pin, GPIO0. It is connected to the gate of a 2007 FET that switches the relay and that is exactly where the problem starts. During startup, the ESP needs GPIO0 to be HIGH, unless you want to go to flash mode, when it needs to be LOW.
But as the ESP8266-01S correctly pulls pin GPIO0 HIGH, the relay will immediately be activated at startup. Hence he designer added a pull down resistor. Due to the presence of the Pull up on GPIO0 on the ESP8266-01 board, that needed to be a very strong pull down resistor and a 2k resistor was chosen. But now the GPIO0 pin is pulled LOW at startup, putting it in flash mode.

There are some simple solutions for this:

remove the 2k resistor. However this will activate the relay at start up.

reroute the triggersignal to come from pin GPIO1 (Tx) or GPIO3 (Rx) (but you still need to remove the 2k resistor)

The latter solution is fairly simpel because of the long PCB trace going from GPIO0 to the gate of the FET